The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [89]
I’m being teased, Seaton thought. The place is haunted. But he didn’t really believe it. He didn’t believe in anything unproven. And it would take a lot to challenge his wilful absence of faith. The music had come from his own provoked mind. The house was dark and atmospheric and there seemed something somehow poised about it. But there was no one here, living or dead. There couldn’t possibly be.
The stairs were naked under his feet, scarred to either side where carpet had been roughly ripped away. He could make out wrenches in the wood from stair rods and pulled tacks. The wood itself seemed solid enough, though, under his feet. The odd stair creaked, but so far the house was blessedly free of the ravages of damp. Damp was what he had feared far more than phantom lunatics. Damp would have rotted and destroyed the film in its hiding place.
It was almost as dark as he wanted it to get by the time he reached the door he knew opened on to the guest room in the tower. It was dusk, what light prevailed scant and murky. He didn’t want to be descending the staircase at night. He didn’t want to be here at night at all. The door to the tower was heavy and wooden and looked original. It held an iron handle above a keyhole large enough to suggest a substantial lock. The handle shifted when he tried to turn it, but the door didn’t budge even a fraction in its frame. Seaton swore to himself and looked around. He had ascended a walled-in staircase to get to the very top of the house as it narrowed towards its summit on his climb. He was on a landing now, with a single small window cut into the stone and giving out on to the dark forest stretched out below. He saw that there was a key lying on the sill. He blinked, incredulous. But when he opened his eyes, the key was still there.
The door was on balanced hinges. It opened inwards with a sigh as soon as the key released the lock. The room within was larger than he had thought it would be, the tower bigger, of course, than it looked from the ground. Opaque light, the last of the day, stole in through the glass of its three disparate windows in their deep stone recesses. The windows were also much bigger than they looked from the ground. And they were set at a curious height. They were set about eight feet from the floor, and so impossible for a man to look through.
To his astonishment, Seaton saw that an item of furniture still remained in the room. A full-length rectangular mirror stood against one wall in a wooden frame with four clawed feet. Even in the diminished light, Seaton could see that patches of the mirror’s mercury backing had cracked and peeled away, so that the wall was visible behind the mirror in places through the glass.
He heard the drifting insinuation of music again. It was much more detailed this time, stride piano and a cracked black voice played under the heavy needle of an antique gramophone. His heart began to beat faster in his chest. His scalp began to itch and he could feel the hairs on his neck stiffen with fear. He was very frightened, he realised suddenly. He was truly afraid. On a shellac recording, at 78rpm, he distinctly heard from somewhere down the stairs a long-dead musician indulge in a dry chuckle.
He looked at the floor, at its seamless covering of dusty hardwood boards. You couldn’t get a coin between them, so tightly were they aligned. Bluesy chords drifted up from below. There was very little light. It was almost